Suspension
by Mithrigil
Summary: If a car goes down off the edge of a bridge onto land, you’ve got a little more chance, a little more control. Over water, though, it’s like you’re in a falling deathtrap. Subaru, with Seishirou, Lady Sumeragi, Hokuto, the Seven Seals.


**Suspension**

**Tokyo Babylon, X **

_Mithrigil Galtirglin_

* * *

"Biggest bridge I was ever on was the Konohana," Sorata is saying, head swerving away from the window of the cab just long enough to smile. He says the rest of what he says to Subaru's reflection, and his own is grinning, teeth and frazzled hair overlapping with the crisscrossed wires outside, as thick as his neck. "And that's still pretty big, but—well, you wouldn't believe it to look at me but I'm still kinda afraid of going over them in cars. Well. In cars, over water, anyway."

Subaru nods. He _is_ listening.

Mostly.

"I mean, cars are cool. Never spent much time in them back at the Temple but I'm _cool_ with them you know? But if a car goes down off the edge of a bridge onto land, you've got a little more chance, a little more control. Over water, though, it's kinda like you're in a flying—falling—deathtrap. And heh, you know, it's backwards for me, on foot or on my bike? I can walk over a water bridge no problem! Even if it's really tall. But walking over land bridges gives me this twisty little feeling in the pit of my stomach—"

"That's really morbid, Arisugawa-san," Arashi says from the front passenger seat.

There are buildings out the window now, not rails. Sorata palms the back of his neck sheepishly and apologizes.

Subaru clears his throat as quietly as he can.

-

Grandmother's favorite paths through the estate coil and wind and are more like meditations, as if she wants to give each blade of grass a lifetime to recover, each water-smoothed rock an eternity to find its way back to its original place. There's a reverence to how she walks them, to how she approaches each tree and each shrine never quite from the same angle. Subaru figures this out slowly enough that there isn't a when to it, from following her, from guessing, from being small and believing.

Hokuto is taller than him this year but only a little. Hokuto gloats about it, not that it makes Subaru sad, but Grandmother seems to think it does and tells her, boys take time, he'll catch up soon, and when he's a man you'll wonder if he ever was a boy, so enjoy it while you can.

"You mean when he gets back from Tokyo?" Hokuto is following Grandmother too, but she isn't looking at the grass or the rocks or the statues, or even Grandmother, really.

Grandmother stops, rests her hands on a rail. The echo of her sandals on the planks bounces up from the water, or most of it. Some of it drowns. "I hope not," Grandmother says. "He has a lot more time, Hokuto—even more than you do before _you_ become a lady!"

-

"Do you drive, Subaru?"

—It's not the question that startles him, it's that it was asked, and how close, and where from. "No," he says, then looks over the heads of everyone waiting and up at the traffic lights, waits for the music to start. "I've never really needed to, so."

When Kamui nods, his face disappears in the shadows of salarymen and whirligig advertising lights, proclaiming everything but what matters. When he looks up, one that does matter cues, and the crowd shuffles across the street, taking Subaru and Kamui with it. "So you've always been in the city?"

"No." It's not admitting, but not correcting either. "Just never…needed to be the one to drive."

The tune the traffic posts play is innocuously familiar, like indiscriminately plunking on only the black keys, same five tones as the classics in a grating machine voice. Kamui nods again. "I was learning to. I don't think it matters anymore."

"Probably not," Subaru agrees.

-

There's a gap in his memory and nothing grows there.

There's a cherry tree but it's not time for it to bloom yet, and it is anyway, lush and full and falling. Or not so much falling as being shoved. Thrown. By wind, so much wind that it's not just taking petals but full blossoms and leaves and the beads around Subaru's neck are cold, so cold, shoving up into his jaw.

There's a young man (not an _ojiisan_ but Subaru's never had a _senpai_) in a high-collared coat with hair and eyes like drying tar. The man's laughing and then kneeling and then whispering and that wind swallows everything, tears through the words and chews them up with the flowers, and then he's putting his mouth on Subaru's hands and something burns. And this isn't the place, there aren't cherry trees in Tokyo, not even the kind that turn into cough medicine and kitsch, so this is wrong, wrong wrong wrong—

-

He throws the fire extinguisher through the window this time, reaches through the glass and opens the door and his hand is slipping inside his glove already, he's not going to let that murderer get what—what he—_there_ not this time, not her—

—too late, someone's—

—someone's always too late—

-

—Oh. Yuzuriha insisted, but half his sorbet's already melted. Maybe she won't notice, she's talking enough, the curve of the spoon hovering near her mouth. There are faint cold streaks on it from the ice cream, precipitation.

"And he fell off," she says, "but Inuki jumped in after him. He made it out okay, but still, no one could see Inuki. I figured maybe they'd see the water dripping off him, never really thought of that, but that didn't happen either….I think it may have been a little selfish of me to think that." She scrapes another spoonful out of her dish. She must eat ice cream really…practicedly, if what's left of hers is mostly solid. Subaru remembers Hokuto always demolishing hers, and Sei— "But yes, he made it out okay. And later, when everyone's parents came to get them, I guess I got embarrassed. I mean, who wouldn't? I know…I know _now_ that I was supposed to be mature and grown up and apologize, but I didn't then. I still _did_…but I think that was maybe the first time I lied." She eats the spoonful. "Really lied," she adds before the ice cream's all down. "I was sorry, but I wasn't…wasn't accepting?"

Subaru nods, glances down at his own spoon. It's sliding on the rim of the parfait glass. Gravity. "It hurts, letting them win."

"—That's what I meant to say," she says now, eyes bright like the fake sundae cherries. "I'd been trying not to pretend, and…and it hurt, when it became the right thing to do."

-

Grandmother doesn't walk anymore now, and her paths are paved and paneled so that she can still take them. Subaru feels guilty every time he sees it, sees her. A million blades of grass, stifled and buried.

If blood feeds the cherry blossoms, what makes the grass green?

"You still have not told me about your new apartment," she says.

Subaru presses the brake of her wheelchair down, but stays kneeling, just a little while longer, just a little closer to the sound of the brook. "It's still in Shinjuku…closer to the Imperial Gardens now. I still don't think I'll ever have time to go, but I like to see them from my window."

Something creaks, maybe bones, maybe wood, maybe water. "You don't ever look," Grandmother chides.

"I do," he says. "Just…sometimes I also see."

-

One kekkai envelops another and suddenly it doesn't matter that there's a rule, _no pedestrians on the walkways after 9 PM_. It never did. They aren't even _on_ the walkways.

Besides. From the start this was supposed to be only them. Only them tearing the concrete to shreds and denting the rails and snapping the wires, testing the bridge, ten cuts at a time and there's gravity, there's an age and effort ending, there's a _covenant_ breaking and Seishirou floating, implacable, _steady_, unfazed. Never fazed. Not even his trenchcoat shreds. Nothing hurts him. Nothing Subaru does can hurt him. Nothing Subaru wants can hurt him.

The bridge splits down the center, implodes, collapses. Wires hiss and reel. The metal gratings dislocate, scrape, creak, chatter. The pavement just falls, chips of concrete, cherry blossoms out of season.

-

"So you don't drive," Arashi says but not to Subaru, listing, her fingers wanting to count but knowing the disrespect if they do, so they don't, "and you don't swim." The cab pulls up to a traffic light. Subaru's close enough to the window, can hear the pedestrian's song. "You really put your life in other people's hands, you know."

"Yeah, yeah," Sorata says, smiling. He scoots forward to lean between the driver and passenger seats, grin close enough to Arashi that she'll blush, Subaru knows it. "It's in yours, remember? I decided on you."

She does blush, and she does shiver, and she does turn away. Subaru turns away as well, to look back at the lanes, the white towers, the wires.

It'll be here. He knows.

---

* * *


End file.
